Kate Elliott - Cold Fire

“Cat!” Bee was shaking me. “Wake up! We’ve come to the river.”

I had fallen asleep. My head was swollen with uneasy dreams, but when I patted my hair, everything seemed in order. I hadn’t sprouted cat’s ears or an eru’s wings. I looked out the window and saw a field of black rocks. Beyond the field flowed a wide river as pale as molten pewter. Light glinted over the water and thrust through my eyes to open a shaft of memory: I am six, and I am drowning alongside my parents. Water pours into my mouth.

“Look!” Bee’s shriek jolted me free.

She pressed open her sketchbook. At the bottom of the page, I saw myself wearing a very irritated expression no doubt because the clothes I wore in the sketch looked like a printed curtain wrapped around my waist topped by an immodestly low-cut blouse of a fabric so gauzy it was almost translucent. Blessed Tanit! As if I would ever dress so indecently! Above, Bee had drawn a field of black rocks. One rock, split in half as if by a bolt of lightning, was circled and had an arrow pointing at it. A river lay behind it and, on the far shore, five mighty ash trees.

I looked out the window. Five mighty ash trees rose on the other side of the river.

“Stop!” She hammered on the roof of the coach.

She shoved the sketchbook into the bag as the coach slowed. Before we came to a stop, she flung open the door and leaped out. Knit bag flapping behind her, she dashed into the rocks like a dog let loose in a trash pit.

The coach lurched to a stop. I jumped out and with sheathed sword in hand ran after her. The rocks were like the oozing remains of a porridge that has congealed into a crusty, jagged blanket. I slipped, caught myself on the nearest rock, and scraped my palm.

Glancing back, I saw the coachman holding the arm of the eru as if restraining her; her wings were half open. Crows cawed. I heard a buzzing noise, like the whirr of a factory floor. A loud splash disturbed the river. Could Bee really escape the spirit world through water?

Bee walked in widening circles, picking her way along the rocks with the knife in her hand. Her body stiffened as she saw something. She dropped to her knees and hacked at the ground.

“Cat, help me!” Dirt spat up.

I hurried over. “What are you doing? Go to the river!”

Ignoring me, she knelt in the cleft of a rock that was split in half. The hollow between the split halves was as wide as my out-stretched arms; rotted debris matted the ground like felted cloth.

“Help me!” She chopped and dug without cease.

The ground heaved. Fissures splintered the earth like veins swelling and bursting. I grabbed her arm to drag her away, but she shoved the knife at me and began digging with her hands.

“Something terrible is going happen if I don’t uncover them,” she cried.

Her fingers scraped dirt off a roundish thing that had a coppery shine. Fractured streaks of light chased patterns along its sheeny surface. Beneath the dirt she uncovered ten; no, twenty; no, fifty. Packed tight and deep, the fist-sized smooth objects filled the hollow.

They were eggs.

With a faint pop, one of the coppery eggs cracked. A sliver like a shard of broken glass thrust through the gap. Away in the distance rose the howl of an enraged beast. Gingerly, I poked at the egg with the knife and peeled back an inner shell wreathed with tendrils of translucent goo. A pasty mass pulsed vilely inside, a slimy grub the color of mottled vomit and metallic yolk.

I dropped the knife and raised my hand to smash it.

“We’ve got to help them get to the river!” Bee grabbed the knife and kept digging.

Horrified by my urge to kill something so small and helpless, I scrambled back to perch on the rock. The grub slithered out of the egg. No bigger than my hand, it had four limbs, a tail, a long beast-like torso, and a deformed back all crinkly like mashed-up paper. It had a snout for a face, with pasty-white strings striping its muzzle and head.

It was foul, and I hated it.

It opened its eyes to reveal molten fire, a blaze of blue-white heat. With a shudder, its outer skin hardened and sloughed off as I might shed a coat on going indoors. Beneath shimmered scaly skin as darkly red as the dregs of smoldering coals.

I could not look away from its eyes. That brilliant, fathomless gaze devoured me.

I had seen a gaze like this before: an old man sitting in a library with no fire and three dogs sprawled close, basking in the heat he radiated. He had kissed Bee on the forehead and on the lips.

I had seen jewel eyes like this in the headmaster’s emerald gaze before the spark was subsumed by ordinary brown.

A shadow fell over us in a flutter of black wings. A crow snatched up the tiny creature and gulped it down in one bite.

Bee screamed with pure rage, but she did not stop digging. Around her, more eggs cracked. A crow landed beside me, intent on the nearest egg. On the rock opposite, a bold creature with the look of a plump rodent poised; it had a meek, chubby face, but a frightening mad gleam in its little black eyes as it fixed on a hatchling squirming up out of the hollow. It lunged and caught the thing, which spat and hissed in vain as the rodent ripped off its head.

I jabbed at the crow, which hopped back. Bee dug. The grubs emerged, shed, and crawled. Their sluggish swarm crept toward the river. Predators descended: more crows; a cruel-billed eagle; stinging flies like a cloud of misery that covered the hatchlings with vibrating wings.

The hatchlings had no voices. They just died.

But the wind had a voice, a rising chatter and roar. Shadows boiled on the horizon. My heart froze in my chest. The creatures of the spirit world were racing or shambling or flying toward us in their tens and hundreds: proud eru, gracile antelopes, sleek wolves, clumsy six-legged oxen.

“Bee.” I crunched over broken copper shells. “You’ve got to get to the river.”

“I have to save them.” Her hands were smeared with the grease and mucus of their rising, and still they writhed upward, on her, across her, for she was oblivious to their blood and slime. “I can’t leave until they’re all dug out.”

“We have to go. Pick up what you can carry in your skirts. I’ll cover your back.”

She gathered up her outer skirt and scooped up what hatchlings she could into the cloth. Then she ran, light on her feet despite the rugged terrain. I cut at crows diving at her head. I swiped my blade through a cloud of glittering-winged creatures that had tiny fox faces and grotesque, elongated limbs like grasshoppers. I stabbed a rat, and shook it free just in time to spear a ghastly huge moth trying to fly away with a hatchling.

A chuckling rolling laugh surprised me. To my right, the four hyenas loped closer. I thrust at the closest, my blade catching in the loose skin of its neck. It swung its head back and forth, almost jerking me off my feet, but I wrenched my blade free and raced after Bee. I stepped on a hatchling, crushing it, but there were a dozen crawling beside it. Birds dropped, snagging up the morsels. Some ate them; others flew higher and dropped the grubs to smash on the rocks.

I grabbed up one of the little pathetic creatures, but it bit me with nasty stinging teeth, and I yelped and let go.

“Cat!” Bee splashed into the shallows and opened her skirt.

Hatchlings spilled, flashing and undulating as they began to swim.

Fish with bulbous eyes and teeth like thorns rose out of the water to feed. Pikes and golden-red salmon breached the surface. The water churned with their thrashing. Blood ran in threads. Hatchlings she had not helped reached the shore, nosing into the water.

I stood with one foot on the bank and one in the water, my blade unsheathed. But with so many hatchlings to feast on, even the hyenas had forgotten us, all except the one I had cut. It looked straight at me with black, intelligent eyes, and gave that unsettling laugh.